After an accident or loss, property owners typically file claims with their insurance companies. In response to these claims, insurance agents or representatives investigate the claims to determine the extent of damage and/or loss, ultimately providing their clients with appropriate compensation.
Determining and documenting the extent of damage can be risky for the appraiser. For example, in a situation where a structure has experienced roof damage, appraisers typically climb onto the roof to evaluate the damage. When climbing onto the roof and maneuvering around the roof for the inspection, the appraiser runs a risk of injury, especially in difficult weather conditions, where the roof may be slippery because of rain, snow, and/or ice and winds may be severe.
Even if the appraiser is not injured, the inspection process is time consuming and inefficient. Once on the roof, appraisers may take a digital picture of the damaged area. Afterwards, the picture is typically attached to an electronic claim file where it can later be analyzed by an appraiser to estimate the extent of damage to the structure. Two-dimensional digital pictures or video of a roof or structure often provide inadequate detail for a thorough inspection of a structure. Issues like poor image quality resulting from camera movement, bad lighting or out-of-focus images can make it difficult to estimate the condition of a property based on an image. To address some of these issues, insurance companies may use 3D-scanners to get a more detailed view of the surface of the roof.
However, both two-dimensional images (2D) and many three-dimensional (3D) surface scans, for example, are unable to capture damage that may have occurred beneath the surface of a roof (e.g., damage to lower layers of shingles, moisture accumulation, rotting of lower layers). For example, a fiberglass mesh layer of a roof that is disposed beneath the surface of the roof may be damaged by impacts and cause a visible divot. Heat from the sun on the roof, however, often causes such divots to reset, making it appear as though the fiberglass mesh layer was not damaged. As a result, such damage to subsurface structures often goes undetected during 2D and 3D surface scans, interfering with, if not preventing, accurate estimates and appraisals of the condition of a structure and/or damage to the structure.